élite form of war-zone show-and-tell,
which prompted questions from partici-
pants like "At what point is it looting?"
and "Who else has stolen the ashtray
from the Rex Hotel?" (in Saigon).
Philip Sherwell, from the Sunday
Telegraph, had brought several items
that he'd "liberated," as he put it, from
Uday Hussein's palace after the fall of
Baghdad. "There was just one room out
in the back that seemed to be still stand-
ing," he said. "It had the most remark-
able collection of incredibly naf and ugly
and ungainly outfits." Sherwell mod-
elled a sampling of the Hussein collec-
tion for the club members. "I thought
this was, like, a Waikiki Beach sort
of thing," he said, holding up a cream-
colored sports jacket with a purple bou-
tonnière. "And this one, I thought,
Elton John would be rather fond ot:" he
went on, putting on a brocaded coat that
was a few sizes too big. ("They're all very
capacious," he said. "U day was a large
chap.") The clothes, judging from the
labels, seemed to have come from W est-
ern designers. "You're thinking, Wow,
he was really breaking sanctions pretty
well," Sherwell said. "But, when you ex-
amine them closely, one of the labels
says 'Yves Sanit Laurent.' And there's a
pair of trousers by both Hugo Boss and
Jean-Paul Gaultier. There was indeed a
little room where ladies had been sew-
ing in the labels."
More tchotchkes: a menu snatched
from lunch with a foreign minister in
Hanoi, circa 1985, featuring "steamed
d fl . " f " s
crap an agrant rIce ; a set 0 tar
Trek" nesting dolls; a talking Osama bin
Laden action figure, smuggled out of
Gaza. (Strangely, mini-Osama spoke
English, and sang what sounded like an
American marching hymn.)
Adam Ellick, a Times reporter, had
left behind the T-shirt he bought from
an official Rwandan tourism office ("It
says 'Genocide!' and then underneath, in
very small letters, it says, 'Celebrating ten
years after,'" he explained) and a four-
foot-high framed needlepoint depicting
the Indonesian dictator Suharto. "In-
stead, I brought something less offensive;'
he said, and presented a "burka bottle
cover," from Mghanistan: a miniature
green burka, about the size of a fifth of
vodka.
"That's not what it is!" a woman inter-
d " Ib h . "
rupte. roug t mIne.
34 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 19,2010
"T chotchke slam!" someone shouted.
Ellick's challenger was Beth Knobel,
a former Moscow bureau chief for CBS
News. She produced a similar item, in
navy blue. ''It is from Mghanistan, but it's
not a bottle cover," she said. "It's a burka
for Barbie."
-Ben McGrath
SIDELINES
THE TOilER.
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,
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A few years ago, when Peter Wolf,
the former front man of the J. Geils
Band, was making a new solo album, he
became very anxious. "I was trying to do
this, and literally the music industry was
deconstructing before my eyes," Wolf said
recently, while eating breakfast at 3 P.M.-
an omelette and a glass of red wine-on
the Upper East Side. "And I was fright-
ened! Record stores were disappearing
before my eyes, man!" He lifted his sun-
glasses to show his eyes-dark, wide, and
bouncy with nervous energy. "My dad
had a book and record store," he added. "I
grew up in record stores-that was my
world. And now it was all gone-boom!-
in a flash of shock and awe."
To calm his nerves, Wolf started paint-
ing again. He was planning to be a painter
before he got sidetracked by music in the
mid-sixties, in Boston, where as a d.j. he
turned a generation of college kids on to
the roots of rock and roll. He taught him-
self painting as a teen-ager, by copying
works that he liked; now, more than forty
years later, he has returned to some of the
paintings that moved him long ago. One
painting in partictÙar resonates with his
current mood and circumstances-"The
T oilers of the Sea," by Albert Pinkham
Ryder (1847-1917), which Wolf first saw
in an art magazine when he was thirteen.
"I t had this elegant primitivism that I re-
sponded to very strongly," he said. At first
glance, the picture looks like a seascape-
a boat in the moonlight on a troubled
sea-but on close study it departs from
perspective and realism in subtle ways,
and the effect is dreamlike. "It's mysti-
cal-you hear the bells," Wolf said.
He became obsessed with Ryder's use
of color in the painting. Somehow, the
artist manages to illuminate the night
without losing the feel of the darkest hour.
"It's in the kind of yellow he used," Wolf
said. "Is it cadmium yellow?" He searched
the Internet for reproductions, but each
one looked a little different. A friend sug-
gested he hunt down the original. Wolf
assumed it had been destroyed; a lot of
Ryder's paintings have deteriorated, be-
cause of his habit of painting over sec-
tions before they had dried. But "The
Toilers" was not only intact; it turned out
to be at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
"That blew my mind," Wolf said. "It
never occurred to me, when I was grow-
ing up in the Bronx, that the actual paint-
ing was right here." He was finally going
to see it.
Another glass of wine, and Wolf was
ready to go. He left the restaurant mutter-
ing, "It has to be cadmium yellow."
On the way to the museum, Wolf said
that he eventually did make the new rec-
ord, "Midnight Souvenirs," which came
out last week. The lyrics, which include
images from a lot of sleepless nights-
W olfis an insomniac and generally doesn't
get to bed before six-are colored with his
musical influences, restÙting in a thick im-
pasto of sound, in which the duets-with
Shelby Lynne, Neko Case, and Merle
Haggard-stand out like splashes of cad-
mium yellow on an inky background. Lis-
ten closely and you'll hear the bells.
It was St. Patrick's Day, and the pa-
rade made crossing Fifth Avenue diffictÙt.
W olt: slim of shank and pale of mien,
wearing black, searched for an opening
among the green revellers. His feet, shod
in soft leather sneakers, glided along the
pavement, never making a sound. Even-
tually, he got across Fifth, entered the mu-
seum, and found the American Wing. A
guard directed him upstairs. ''The Toilers"
was in the rear, high up on a partition.
"There appears to be no yellow at all!"
Wolf exclaimed, gobsmacked, squinting.
He studied the painting in rapt silence.
"It's rougher than I had imagined." An-
other five minutes passed. 'Wow, you can
get lost in this painting, which is also what
I like about songs."
Before leaving, Wolf snapped a photo
with his BlackBerry. On the screen the
sea foam was bright yellow. "Oh, my
God!" he said. 'What does that mean?" It
was something to think about during an-
other sleepless night.
-John Seabrook